Best Space Pictures of 2010: Odd Aurora, Ring of Fire, More

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Best Space Pictures of 2010: Odd Aurora, Ring of Fire, More

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Annular Eclipse Over Bangkok

An airplane is silhouetted against the first solar eclipse of the decade, seen over Bangkok, Thailand, in January. The annular eclipse blotted out 57 to 80 percent of the sun over Thailand, depending on the province, Sakshin Bunthawin of Songkla University told the Phuket Gazette.

A colorful, craggy column of dust and gas dubbed the Mystic Mountain stars in a picture from the Hubble Space Telescope released April 23 as part of celebrations for Hubble's 20th anniversary. The picture highlights the results of star birth in the Carina nebula. (See astronomers' picks of some of the best Hubble pictures.)

This crisp view of a sunspot, captured by New Jersey Institute of Technology's New Solar Telescope and released in August, may be the most detailed picture of its kind yet shot in visible light, astronomers say.

The 5.25-foot (1.6-meter) telescope, which became operational in 2009, sits at the school's Big Bear Solar Observatory in the San Bernardino Mountains of California. The device uses a special deformable mirror—part of what's called an adaptive optics system—to compensate for atmospheric distortions and produce ground-based images with about the same clarity as shots from orbiting observatories, experts say.

Like a sparkling firework, much of the Japanese space probe Hayabusa disintegrates as it reenters Earth's atmosphere on June 13. Hidden in the shower of sparks was a heat-shielded, 16-inch (40-centimeter) capsule later found to contain precious scrapings from an asteroid, which could help us understand how our planet and solar system formed.

Hayabusa is among the few spacecraft to return rock samples from space. Other such missions include the Apollo program, which retrieved moon rocks in the late 1960s and early '70s, and the comet-dust harvester Stardust, which crashed into the Utah desert at 28,900 miles (46,400 kilometers) an hour in 2006.

Patches of southern Australia's shallow Lake Eyre seem to form a grimacing face in an August 2006 satellite picture. The picture is 1 of 40 released as part of November 2010's Earth as Art 3 collection, the latest compilation of NASA and U.S. Geological Survey Landsat pictures chosen for their artistic quality.

When seasonal rains are plentiful, Lake Eyre is Australia's largest lake, according to the USGS. But it's also an "ephemeral" feature in a dry land: The lake has filled only three times during the past 150 years, the USGS noted.

Overall, "the collected images are authentic and original in the truest sense," Matt Larsen, the USGS's associate director for Climate and Land Use Change, said in a statement. "These magnificently engaging portraits of Earth encourage us all to learn more about our complex world."

To snap the above image, Rosetta swooped about 1,965 miles (3,162 kilometers) above Lutetia's surface. The image is the highest-resolution photo taken of the space rock, located more than 270 million miles (440 million kilometers) away from Earth, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. (Watch a video of Rosetta's flyby.)

The sharp edge visible above, at bottom, may be evidence that 81-mile-wide (130-kilometer-wide) Lutetia broke off from a "mother asteroid," said NASA space scientist Claudia Alexander, who led the United States' involvement in the Rosetta mission.

Even for astronauts, this May image was a rare sight indeed: an aurora hovering over the southern Indian Ocean.

Auroras occur when charged particles from the sun collide with Earth's upper atmosphere, causing atoms of oxygen and nitrogen to gain energy and then release it in the form of light.

Auroras typically are visible only near Earth's Poles, where magnetic field lines channel charged particles toward the planet. But this aurora australis, photographed from the International Space Station, occurred during a geomagnetic storm, which can temporarily shift the planet's magnetic field—and hence its auroras—closer to the Equator.

The hourglass shape of the supernova remnant SN 1987A isn't as well balanced as thought, according to an August picture of the exploded star.

Using data on the remnant from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, astronomers were able to confirm that, when massive stars explode, some of the ejected material gets shot into space faster than other debris, as predicted by computer models.